John’s Wall Street disaster was personal. He assumed all liabilities. Therefore it did not involve his partners, save that he owed Slaymaker and Pick nearly half a million dollars on his notes. Nor did it touch Thane and Agnes. He took good care of that. On the day of his return to Pittsburgh he had dinner with them. They had moved again, to a house of their own, one they had built on an unspoiled eminence among some fine old trees. They exhibited it with the pride of children. It was large and expensively made, with an unpretentious air, and one of its features, saved until the last, was an apartment for John. They hardly expected him to adopt it. However, it should be his always, just like that, whenever it might please him to come, and it had pleased them to do it.
The evening meal was no longer supper. It was dinner. Thane at last was comfortable in the society of servants, even in the brooding, anonymous presence of a butler.
Agnes now was in full bloom. Life had touched her in its richest mood. There were moments in which her aura seemed luminous, like a halo; or was that a trick of John’s imagination? He had not seen her for above[317] a year. She was more at ease with him than she had ever been, spontaneous, friendly, quite unreserved, and by the same sign infinitely further away. There was no misunderstanding her way with Thane nor Thane’s with her. They had achieved the consonance of two principles. They were the two aspects of one thing, separate and inseparable, like right and left, like diameter and circumference. What one thought the other said; what one said the other thought. They conversed without words.
Agnes pressed John with questions about the Wall Street episode. They had read a good deal about it in the newspapers. His narrative left much to be vaguely imagined.
“But you yourself—how did you come out?” she asked. “Nobody else appears to have got hurt. What happened to you?” For on that point he had been evasive.
“I did get rubbed a bit,” he said. “Don’t worry about it. I’m all right.”
She looked at him thoughtfully.
“Tell him what we’ve been doing,” she said, turning to Thane.
“Remember,” said Thane, “you said once we’d see ore go in at the top of a blast furnace and come out rails at the other end of the mill without stopping?”
“Yes,” said John, sitting up.
“That gave me an idea,” Thane continued. “We’ve done it. It’s experimental yet but we can do it. Take the steel ingots straight out of the soaking pit and put them through the rolls with no reheating.”
[318]
“Does anybody know it?” John asked.
“Just ourselves,” said Thane.
Agnes took it up there, described the process in detail, and told how Thane had evolved it through endless nights of trial and failure. John was amazed at the extent and accuracy of her knowledge. Thane anticipated his question.
“She knows,” he said. “She could run a mill.”
It was literally true. John was thrilled to hear how at night, in cap and overalls, she had been going with Thane to the mill to watch his experiments. Not only did she learn to understand them; she could discuss them technically, and make helpful suggestions. She had taken up the study of metallurgy in a serious way. She spent her days digesting scientific papers in English, French and German and was continually bringing new knowledge to Thane’s attention. Later to her immense delight she saw phases of this knowledge translate itself through Thane’s hands into practice at the mill.
“It’s in the blood,” said John, bound with admiration.
It was a cherishable evening. After dinner they sat on the veranda. Below them was a bottomless sea of velvety blackness, with no horizon, no feeling of solid beneath it, sprinkled at random with lights and intermittently torn by flashes from blast furnaces and converters many miles away.
“It’s like looking at the sky upside down,” said Agnes.
They could feel what was taking place off there in[319] the lamp-black darkness. Men were tormenting the elements, parting iron from his natural affinities, giving him in new marriage without love or consent, audaciously cre............